For summer, VW (VeneKlasen/Werner) is pleased to present James Lee Byars: The Poetic Conceit and Other Works. This exhibition is one of three James Lee Byars shows simultaneously on view this summer, alongside The Figure of Death and The Moon Column at Michael Werner Gallery, New York and The Diamond Floor at Michael Werner Gallery, London.

Throughout his prolific career Byars pursued with tireless curiosity his life-long obsessions with ideal form and a personalized notion of “perfect”. This exhibition traces issues of perception, language, and contemplation in Byars’ oeuvre: “The Capital of the Golden Tower” (1991), “The Poetic Conceit” (1983) and the performative “Hole for Speech” (1981) each exemplify the artist’s philosophical ideals and his quest for a new, spiritual form of pure communication. On view in the gallery´s cinema is the 16mm film “Autobiography” (1970), a rare example of James Lee Byars’ use of film in which the artist appears on screen for a fraction of a second. Together, these four pieces form a distinct body of work that explores and questions the ethereal nature of language and communication.
James Lee Byars was born in Detroit in 1932 and studied art and psychology at Wayne State University. He presented his first museum exhibition in 1958, a legendary event that took place in the stairwell of New York's Museum of Modern Art and lasted only one day. Over the following decade Byars lived and worked in Japan where he presented many performances and exhibitions, including “The Performable Square” in the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, in 1962. In 1964 he was invited to present three performances at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Byars returned to America in 1967, dividing his time between New York and Los Angeles; by the 1970s he began to spend increasing amounts of time in Europe. Since that time Byars has been the subject of numerous gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide, including Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; IVAM Centre del Carme, Valencia; Castello di Rivoli/Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin; The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; and Fundaçao de Serralves, Porto. Byars died in Cairo in 1997. Important posthumous exhibitions include The Epitaph of Con. Art is which Questions have disappeared?, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (1999); The Arts Club of Chicago (2000); Life Love and Death, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg (2004); The Perfect Silence, Whitney Museum of American Art (2005); I'm Full of Byars, Kunstmuseum Bern (2008); The Perfect Axis, Schloss Benrath, Düsseldorf; and Klein Byars Kapoor, Musée d'art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain, Nice and ARoS Kunstmuseum, Århus, Denmark (2012-2013). In 2013, “The Figure of the Interrogative Philosophy” and “The Figure of the Question of Death” were included in the 55th Venice Biennale exhibition The Encyclopedic Palace, curated by Massimiliano Gioni.

Last summer, MoMA PS1 in New York presented James Lee Byars: 1/2 an Autobiography, the most comprehensive survey of Byars organized in North America since the artist's death in 1997. Organized in cooperation with Museo Jumex in Mexico City, where it debuted in spring 2013, the exhibition featured a selection of sculptures, fabric works, performable paper pieces, ink paintings, live performance and ephemera.

The Poetic Conceit and Other Works opens on 24 June and remains on view through 22 August 2015. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11AM to 6PM. For more information please call the gallery at +49 30 8161 60418, write to info@vwberlin.com or visit vwberlin.com.

On the occasion of the first exhibition of Alain Jacquet at the gallery, a catalogue will be co-edited with Flammarion. It will be bilingual French/English with texts written by Alain Cueff, art historian and contemporary art specialist and Anne Tronche, art critic and curator, with an introduction of Catherine Millet, editor in chief of Art Press and member of Alain Jacquet comity

We are delighted to announce an exhibition of recent works by Thomas Struth, showing large size photographs made in the context of three different recent projects that deal with aspects of the contemporary world and the collective subconscious: places of scientific and technological research, Disney’s theme park and works made in Israel and Palestine.

Since 2009 Struth has been photographing places of industrial innovation and scientific progress. Thus he approaches the complexity of technical developments and enables an insight into usually unaccessible areas, which at the same time leave uncertainty about meaning and function of the depicted. They show what lies behind the technological innovation and objects we use every day, but do not really understand. In this sense these images depict the subconscious of our society in the digital era. At the same time they are a continuous study of the entanglement in a one-sided belief in progress. The increasing degree of fascination for the tools we construct to investigate
into scientific and material progress distract us from the equal need for progress on social and political level.
The second group of photographs was taken at Disneyland in California. It allows an insight view into the western image-making industries. Similar to earlier photographs, these pictures often show deserted panoramas, which appear somehow disconcerting for an amusement park attracting fifteen million visitors per year. Reduced to their outer setting, they unveil their nature as artificial, illusory worlds of papier-maché. At the same time they refer to the great effort and precision with which these worlds are being staged.
Between 2009 and 2014 Thomas Struth travelled to Israel and Palestine six times.
His visits were informed by listening to the stories of his guides and other people he met along the way, “my exploration was about observing the human drama and what seemed to touch me most. In essence, it was about the reading of the signifiers and the pictorial possibilities of the place”. And, in eschewing the colossal for the personal, Struth set himself “the challenge of how to condense an epic narrative into a still image”. In the show we will present images of the “Church of the Holy Sepulchre” in Jerusalem and of places of scientific research In Israel.
For Struth, the act of journeying and seeing when scouting for locations is crucial. He combines a personal analysis of an instinctive sense and narrative of a place with a formal topological view, to create a composition that elucidates something revelatory.
Thomas Struth is one of the leading artists in contemporary photography. Born in Geldern near Cologne in 1954, from 1973 to 1980 he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy as student of Gerhard Richter and then Bernd Becher. By the end of the Seventies, he started to explore the possibilities of photography as psychological research. Since 1978 he takes pictures of urban landscapes, from 1980 he photographs museum visitors looking at paintings, thus exploring the different relationships between painting and photography, art and the viewer. Later he works on a broader range of subjects, working always in theme groups.
His work has been shown extensively in museums throughout the world. In 2003 the Metropolitan in New York staged a large retrospective, he had exhibitions at the Prado in Madrid in 2007 and at the Madre in Naples in Spring 2008. Struth’s several important solo exhibitions have included a European retrospective exhibition in 2010 to 2012 Thomas Struth, Photographs 1978-2010, shown at Kunsthaus Zürich; K20, Düsseldorf; Whitechapel, London and Museu Serralves, Porto. His works are in the collections of MoMA and the Metropolitan in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo and Kunsthaus Zürich among many others. In March 2016, Museum Folkwang in Essen will be the first of several museums in Germany and the US, presenting a retrospective tour of Struth’s works from 2005 to the present, focusing on new technology and visual manifestations of scientific research.